Reflections in Christ

Today, Lazarus is raised. After the Resurrection of the Lord, he will become a bishop on the island of Cyprus. And eventually he will die again. In fact, his relics are with us to this…

Every year, on the fifth Sunday of Great Lent, we celebrate our venerable mother Mary of Egypt, one of the greatest saints shining in the firmament…

“Standing, O saint, before Christ the Light, send down light upon me, for with love I celebrate thy light-giving and holy memory” (Matins Canon, Ode One). See…

The Fifth Week of Lent is a week of remarkable hymnody—the alphabetical stichera of Saint Simeon Metaphrastes on Wednesday night, the Great Canon…

The so-called Canon of the Akathist, composed by Saint Joseph the Hymnographer, opens with these words: “O pure Virgin, living book of Christ, sealed by the Spirit.” She…

During the first week of Lent, we sang the Great Canon of Saint Andrew over the course of four nights at Great Compline; today this lengthy penitential canon…

The Ladder of Saint John leads the Christian, step by step, rung by rung, along the ascent to heaven. Naturally, the higher steps…

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Today, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, the holy apostle Paul instructs us that “he who sanctifies”—Christ himself…

The angel’s greeting—“Hail!”—literally means “rejoice” in Greek, and this coincidence was not lost on the Fathers of the Church, who saw the angelic announcement as…

The earliest Church, from the days of the apostles and into the first centuries, had an abundant share of guts and what everyone else regarded as perversity.  Its claims…